Lean for Social Impact – June 23rd

I’m thrilled to announce that on June 23rd I’ll be the lead instructor, together with Bob Dorf as Chief Mentor, for the new +Acumen course Lean for Social Change. This is our first large-scale launch of this course, after a very successful pilot late last year. Sabrina and Afzal wrote a great post sharing what they got out of the first course.

Bob is a startup guru, and having the opportunity to partner with him is incredible. In case you don’t now Bob, he’s the co-author, with Steve Blank, of The Startup Owner’s Manual: A Step–By–Step Guide to Building a Great Companyand he’s a serial entrepreneur who has started seven companies (he describes them as “two home runs, two base hits, and three great tax losses”) and coached or invested in dozens more. More than just an expert who travels the world helping startups, incubators, big companies and governments, Bob is exceptionally kind and humble, he’s an incredible coach who is quick with a smile. And, lucky for us, he’s bribable with Diet Cokes.

This is going to be a fun, rubber-hits-the-road course – highly practical and hands on, and intensive. It will push you to take the steps you need to take to get out of the building, talk to customers, put your minimum viable product in their hands, and get the real feedback you need to make your social venture a success.

No expertise required! But like everything you’ll get out what you put in. If you have a social venture that you’re working on, or planning to work on, this course will kick you out of first gear. It’s hands-on. You’ll take powerful frameworks and put them into practice.

Here’s the deal, so you know what to expect going in:

It’s an intensive, eight week course. Best guess is that you’ll need to put in 10 hours per week. (The time you put in for this course will be highly leveraged, so think of this in terms of time saved not time lost.)

You’ll be using the business model canvas to map out your business; you’ll build out a real prototype; and you’ll get of the building to get the feedback you need from customers, suppliers, partners, and competitors etc.

Work is done in teams. You’ll be learning from and supporting each other, not sitting alone in front of a computer.

Course participants will have an idea for a social venture tackling an issue of poverty. If you don’t have a fully formed idea yet that’s OK, the course will help you form and shape one.

This course is a chance for you to take a big leap forward. It’s an opportunity to use tools that have revolutionized Silicon Valley and apply them to your social venture. It’s kind of the start of a revolution. Be part of it.